Notify user that akismet has put his comment under moderation

Question

Is it possible to notify the user if akismet put his submitted comment as "awaiting approval"? I submit the comment via Ajax in Wordpress and would just like to display a text message if his comment does not get published right away.

I don't know if this info can be accessed at all. Have any of you tried this before?

Answer 1

I would disable Akismet; it's horrible and discourages commenting. In your WP-Admin, Settings >> Discussion ... check off "Before a comment appears" >> "Before a comment appears An administrator must always approve the comment." Then the user will know his/her comment is awaiting moderation.

But just about every user hates finding out that they have to wait for a moderator to review their comment before it will be published.

Why disable Akismet?

1. Large numbers of bloggers and regular commentators who never spam have been flagged by Akismet as spammers.
2. Any commentator who has been flagged as a spammer is treated rudely by your blog. They never see the message your comment is being moderated so they have no way of knowing what happened to their comment.
3. If you have a particular box checked in the Akismet configuration, comments left for real people who have been flagged incorrectly as commentators in posts more than 30 days old are immediately deleted and they see a blank white page. See how to turn off Akismet Comment deletion.
4. Read the many other posts and hundreds of comments related to problems with Akismet.

(Recommended) I'd install GrowMap Anti-Spam (GASP) and use that. It's free and it works. All it does is require the user to click a checkbox, but it's quite effective. Just look at the reviews. You can read the documentation there, and download it from the .org website.

An alternative would be to consider enabling real-time comments using the SiteBrains WP Plugin for blocking spam, profanity, garbage texts, bots, irrelevant embedded links/spam links, etc. Just download it and install per the instructions.

Answer 2

I agree with Jason. GASP exists because my blog was getting over 1000 comments a day Akismet didn't block. What Akismet did very well was put my regular commenters comments into spam along with the 1000 others.

The day I installed GASP (created by Andy Bailey who also created CommentLuv) it blocked all but 40 comments - which means 960 were left by bots and not blocked by Akismet.

I refuse to moderate comments on any site that doesn't use GASP and I delete Akismet in every blog I touch. Some bloggers do run both without problems, but then they have to rescue their real comments from spam so I don't see the benefit.